Waking up to WisdomIn Stillness and Community

A Living Silence

How can you understand silence -- chaotic or otherwise? Is it possible for you to capture that silence? When that silence starts operating through you, it is something extraordinary, something vital and living. This structure which is trying to understand the nature of it, capture it, contain it or give _expression to it, cannot co-exist with it.

The difficulty is you seem to know a lot about this state -- you have imagination. You imagine it and begin to think about it. This imagination must go. That silence is something living and the structure which is trying to capture it is a dead structure. You are living the lives of your thoughts. All thoughts are dead -- it doesn't matter whose thoughts.

If there is any such thing as silence, chaotic or otherwise, living or dead, it will begin to express itself. When it expresses itself you are not there. So, you will never know the nature of that silence at all. What you call silence is not silence at all.

Q: Is there thought in that silence?A: No. That will be another, parallel, movement. Thought is a mechanical thing and can solve only mechanical problems. But you want to use it to understand something living; that is the problem. It is not intended for that. Human problems are something living. You cannot use thinking to solve those problems.

Q: Is there beauty in that silence?A: What is beauty? You really don't know. You wouldn't know what you are looking at. And in that state of not knowing what is there fills the whole of your being. That, you may call beauty. But if you capture that in terms of your experiencing structure, then it is lost.